There will be no Webwork assignments for the Voting Theory unit. Instead, there will be only paper homework assignments, which will be collected in class. The first assignment is posted on the link on the right side of the blog under Voting Worksheets, and will be collected in class on Wednesday, April 19. A selection of solutions will be available for you to check your answers in the CAS or my office before Wednesday.
how many points are these assignments?
ReplyDeleteThey will be 10 points each in your homework grade.
DeleteIs there more that we need to learn for this assignment that we'll be going over in class Monday or have we covered all we need to know for it? Also, how many of these assignments are we going to do before the final?
ReplyDeleteNo, you should have everything you need to be able to do these.
DeleteOn voting worksheet one, problem number 4a is the question asking how many points for just one round of voting? So since there are 4 candidates, would you do 4+3+2+1 = 10 points per voter?
ReplyDeleteHillary R.
Right. This election is being determine by Borda Count, so there's just one round of voting in which every voter gives a full ranking of the candidates on their ballot.
DeleteWith the voting concepts; I know you said at the end of class today that there is no way that on question can be fair according to all of the methods, so does that mean that there is also no way for all of the methods to prove that a question is unfair entirely. I am not sure if the question makes since the way I worded it, but I was contemplating that after class today and was curious of the answer to it.
ReplyDelete-Cassie Brandon
sorry. My husband is logged into his email which is why it is his name as the profile.
DeleteArrow's Impossibility Theorem tells us that for each voting method, you can find a preference table (of election results) in which one of the fairness criteria is violated. For example, this doesn't mean that all elections determined with plurality will have a violation of one of the fairness criteria; just that there are SOME elections using plurality that are unfair.
DeleteThis homework was very confusing but I finally understand it more with help from tutors, but for number 5 I had some trouble finding numbers that would give me an example of a situation where both methods would not work. would a candidate have to have less than half of the voters?
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure what you mean by both methods would not work, but you do want to create a preference table where every candidate has less than half the votes. For number 5, I am just asking if there will always be a candidate who has a majority of first place votes in an election. We saw some examples in class where no one had a majority of first place votes, so you should be able to say no, not every election will have a majority candidate. Now, you need to create a preference table with three candidates where no one has a majority of first place votes.
DeleteI think that pairwise is very self explanatory because it is comparing the basic scores in a chart. The other methods you are taking multiple different numbers and either multiplying or adding them. I am not sure how you got those numbers because it didn't seem like they were straight from the chart. I think this applies for plurlarity, and borda.
ReplyDeleteIn all of the methods, the vote totals come from the preference table (which is a summary of the ballots). The only method that involves multiplication is Borda Count - with this method, you give the candidates 1 point for each last place vote, 2 points for each second to last place vote, etc. You can calculate the point total for each candidate by multiplying the number of votes received in each ranking by the points for that ranking and then adding each of these products.
DeleteYou can certainly calculate some statistics with voting theory. For example, you might be interested in the probability of plurality violating the irrelevant alternatives criterion. We won't be computing any probabilities or statistics, though. As far as whether voting theory will relate to your career choice, that depends a lot on your career choice. If you will ever be in a situation where you need to take a vote (even for something as simple as the location of the company holiday party), you will need to decide how you're going to choose a winner, so knowing about these voting methods could come in handy.
ReplyDeleteI'm not quite following your question here. If you don't have the ballots, you'd have to be given some other information to be able to determine how many votes a candidate got.
ReplyDeleteThis unit is cool because we get to see the ways of voting and how elections can go differently with all of the methods. I like the Borda Count Method the best because you give point to the different rankings.
ReplyDeleteThan you for teaching us the different voting methods. It is very interesting how a different method can create a different outcome....mekelle mcbee
ReplyDeleteOn the first voting method worksheet on question 4 part A it says using the Borda count method There are 4 candidates in an election, how many points are given out by one ballot? I was wondering how you would figure out the answer to that because I don't remember us discussing it in class. - Isis Davis
ReplyDeleteWhen going through the worksheet I thought it was very interesting to see how different voting methods could change the outcome of the winner. When thinking of voting I would normally just think whoever has the most votes wins but its awesome to see that there are different ways to go about voting and some are more fair than others.
ReplyDelete- Tiana Butler
I did not find the voting method material to be very worthwhile in learning. I think it was a waste of our time. I also did not like that the voting theory material homework was not on webwork. I forgot about one of the assignments (which is my own fault) because I was so used to checking webwork for the assignments. I think you should just add an extra section on the webwork if you're going to include this in this class.
ReplyDeleteAlthough the voting theory showed us the different methods for election voting, I feel like it might be hard to remember in the future and use personally.
ReplyDelete